Free Republic

A new CNN poll finds that about half of Republicans sympathize with the tea party movement. The other half either remain aloof or (5%) even express hostility. That second group of Republicans has received remarkably little media attention this cycle. Yet their man -- Mitt Romney -- has held steady in first or second place for the past three years. Meanwhile tea party Republicans have bounced from Sarah Palin to Donald Trump to Michele Bachmann to Rick Perry to (now) Herman Cain, transfixing the media every time they lose faith in one messiah and search for another. Yet sooner or...

Dearly as I esteem Ross Douthat, I thought his blogpost today on the press and Sarah Palin did not hit the nail on the head. Ross: "No politician, from Bush to Barack Obama to Nancy Pelosi, is hated so intensely by so many Americans [as Sarah Palin]. And this is what’s so problematic, to my mind, about much of the Palin coverage: The media often acts as though they’re covering her because her conservative fan base is so large (hence the endless talk about her 2012 prospects), when they’re really covering her because so many liberals are eager to hear...

Perhaps anticipating that the media would begin ripping Sarah Palin’s interview with Sean Hannity earlier tonight underestimated the speed of the news cycle. Less than an hour later and a network away, Palin’s fellow conservative David Frum responded to her comments with a good-natured plea for her to just “stop talking now.” On MSNBC’s The Last Word, Lawrence O’Donnell noted that he would have wanted to hear Palin explain the difficulty of finding an appropriate timing to respond to the attacks on her, introducing the review of her performance on Hannity without deeply analyzing any particular part of it. Frum...

Soho Properties has paid some $5 million in cash to buy the Burlington Coat Factory building, a building that yields no income. They are paying rent to hold rights to the Con Ed building, which also yields no income. All of this in the midst of the worst commercial property slump in memory, in an area of New York with a very uncertain economic future. And these are not super-rich guys: Sharif el-Gamal lives in an Upper West Side apartment purchased in 2007 for $1 million. Click here to read what $1 million bought in Manhattan before the crash. You...

David Frum has finally jumped the shark. Some conservative/right-of-center folks may have been willing to give him the benefit of the doubt before but playing the race card is something that is universally despised by conservative and moderates. Frum pulls the race card from the bottom of the deck against Governor Palin's new ad: Here’s Sarah Palin’s new ad. Lots of images of the former governor speaking to adoring crowds, meeting admirers, encountering women and children.... Republicans normally work hard to ensure that their ads feature non-white faces, to present an image of welcome and inclusion. In Palin’s ad --...

Seated on the same side of an antique table before a large audience, Presidents Barack Obama and Dimitri Medvedev smile at one another as they exchange documents encased in red and black leather folders. The new START treaty has been signed, completing a journey Obama began when he visited the Czech Republic a year ago and announced his intention to begin ridding the world of nuclear weapons. He has reset relations between Russia and the United States and fulfilled a dream of another American President: Ronald Reagan. The cold war is over. Back in America, the former half-term governor of...

Former Bush speechwriter David Frum says it’s hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the GOP disaster. And he blames this “most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s” on conservatives and Republicans: At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo – just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994. Only, the hardliners overlooked a few key facts: Obama was elected with...

Mitt Romney’s new book, No Apology, makes a very striking contrast with the most recent book entry by a potential Republican presidential candidate, Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue. Palin’s subject is Palin: her wrongs and grievances. Unlike Palin, Romney cares about the external world. His book is an action plan, not a memoir. It is crammed with factual claims and policy recommendations, with only the lightest sprinkling of self-references. You may have already heard my theory of the two Romneys, Good Romney and Bad Romney. No Apologies is mostly written by Good Romney, but Bad Romney does make himself heard at...

"Go ahead — hit me.” That’s what the Iranian regime is saying to the United States. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claims his scientists have enriched a batch of uranium to 20% radioactivity, well past the level needed for electricity production, but closer to the 90% level required for warheads. He boasted that his country should now be considered a “nuclear state.” Nations bent on nuclear breakout do not usually issue progress reports. They move stealthily, until they are ready to detonate a finished weapon. That’s what India did in the 1970s, ... By contrast, the Iran nuclear program issues press releases...

President Obama seems full of double talk these days, all smoke and mirrors, as Angelina Jolie reportedly has described him. (I’m loathe to borrow words from a celebrity but it is a spot on assessment.) Listening to the president’s comments lately, one would think the Republicans were in the governing majority over the past year and it was their fault the president couldn’t push through his costly, government expansion agenda. This is of course despite the reality that last year, the Democrats had solid majorities in both the House and Senate. Now that Obama is not delivering on his promises...

[Chuckles @ LGF] Johnson’s comment seems to me radically unfair. Pawlenty is a model of sensible modern conservatism. His answers to Newsweek’s barbed questions indicate an instinct for practical compromise, even as he eschews any personal support for creationism. That said, the interview – and Johnson’s reaction – bespeak a religious problem for Pawlenty that will require much tact on his part and that of his campaign team. Pawlenty now attends an evangelical church, but he was born and raised a Roman Catholic. He changed denominations at marriage, accepting his wife’s evangelical faith. Without pretending any insight into the souls...

David Frum nails it today. A favorite target of conservatives (including myself at one point), Mr. Frum gets it right on his blog post about how our tip-toeing around the issue of racial pro-filing resulted in the Fort Hood disaster. Here are two excerpts.

Writing on his website, which used to be called “New Majority” until he got tired of people laughing at him, David Frum published an essay called “The Palin Fantasy” over the weekend. Even as the House of Representatives was preparing to pass the most blatantly unconstitutional assault on America’s freedom in Congressional history, Frum found something really outrageous to write about: Matthew Continetti’s admiring essay on Sarah Palin’s populist appeal. It’s a good thing Frum has his priorities in order. We wouldn’t want Palin to get into office and drop a few trillion dollars of unsustainable debt on us. Frum...

The ostensible subject of their debate at FrontPage Magazine is: "Is Glenn Beck Good for Conservatives?" But David Horowitz, after an opening compliment of David Frum, makes clear, in scathing language I have never seen him use against another conservative, that the real problem and the real subject of the discussion is not Beck, but Frum himself. (I've abridged Horowitz's comment, but the whole thing is worth reading, as he goes into detail tearing apart Frum's pious claim that Frum in the past has defended conservatives from liberal attacks.) Horowitz replies to David Frum: ... But it is the intemperate...

When Glenn Beck made his Fox debut, some shrewd conservatives responded with a wink. Maybe the show was paranoid and hysterical. Maybe Beck was none too scrupulous about facts and truth. But why be squeamish? The other side did as bad, or nearly. And see how usefully he mobilized the base! Those shrewd conservatives assumed Beck was working for them. Big mistake. Beck is working for himself – and he chooses his targets according to his own scheme of priorities. The newest target is Cass Sunstein, confirmed yesterday by the Senate as director of the Office of Information and Regulatory...